Mark and Jeri Webb’s collections include—but are far from limited to—vintage travel postcards, wooden deer heads, antique Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, outsider art, religious iconography, and the old wooden shoes that hang like crown molding around the perimeter of their kitchen. “It starts with one,” Mark explains, “and then there’s another one, and before you know it— “
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Out of respect for sensitive guests, the Webbs keep religious iconography like crucifixes and altar candles upstairs, in the master bedroom. “If you want a tattoo, put it someplace where not everybody has to look at it,” says Jeri, who travels the world searching for new products as the director of stores at the Field Museum. (Mark’s a museum guy too: he works as production manager for the Adler Planetarium.) “You don’t want to offend anybody.”
But circumspection didn’t stop them from putting a life-size African statue of a nude man on a tree-stump pedestal and placing it prominently between the kitchen and the dining room. “By putting him up that high you really get to view him in his entirety,” Jeri says. “I love the surprise of that.” —Tate Gunnerson
Mark: “Almost all of them are French. We looked for them in the Netherlands, but we couldn’t find any.”
Jeri: “It’s a little bit of an OCD thing in three dimensions.”
Mark: “It’s always a surprise when you come across a snake. They don’t announce that they’re coming. It’s sort of interesting when you walk in the front door and see them there.”
Jeri: “You can get close to them and really look at them. If they were all up on the wall nine feet in the air, you wouldn’t be able to see them. But these are pretty visible.”
